The British don't do art cinema. Social realism is our thing, or period movies, or rom-coms, or satire. That's the received wisdom, anyhow. You have to narrow your eyes and look back to the 1980s – to the heyday of Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter and Terence Davies – to the last time Britain appeared to be fertile territory for art cinema and auteur directors.

Until now. Quietly, with little fuss, and almost no critical fanfare, it looks as though we are in the middle of a British art-cinema bonanza, the like of which we haven't seen for decades. In the last 12 months we have seen the release of such unabashedly visionary films as Sleep Furiously, Hunger, Unrelated, Better Things, Soi Cowboy, and Of Time and the City. Soon we will be getting Fish Tank, from Andrea "Red Road" Arnold, and Berlin film festival discovery Katalin Varga, from debut director Peter Strickland, who grew up in Reading. Serious film-makers such as Strickland, Gideon Koppel, Joanna Hogg, Thomas Clay and Duane Hopkins have, to all intents and purposes, appeared from nowhere; others, such as Arnold, Turner prize-winner Steve McQueen, and veteran auteur Davies have consolidated already considerable reputations.

How do we define, cinematically speaking, this new film-making style? Superficially, there are huge differences, ranging from poetic non-fiction essays (Sleep Furiously, Of Time and the City), fables of obsession and murder (Helen, Red Road), overtly self-conscious imagism (Soi Cowboy, Hunger), unsettling, tiny-budget dramas (Katalin Varga, Unrelated). But they seem to be united by a radical spirit of adventure, and a refusal to conform to industry norms. The best definition so far comes from Hunger producer Robin Gutch, one of the key figures in this rarified world – a veteran of the experimental FilmFour Lab and currently joint managing director of low-budget digital studio Warp X. "All these films," he says, "have cinema in their DNA, in the pace and the rhythm. They are going back to artistic basics, trying to purify the medium rather than being avant garde."

He does, however, point out that glacial image-making isn't the be-all and end-all of this new wave. "There's a slight danger in assuming the new art cinema is all about long takes. Andrea Arnold's aesthetic is very much about capturing performance, often with a more accelerated pace than the other films." Arnold was one of the trailblazers of the current crop of British auteurs with her 2006 film Red Road, which did well at Cannes; she was seen as the heir of Lynne Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar were made in the more hostile environment of the late 90s and early 2000s. Ramsay's career then ran into the sand over her troubled adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones, which has since been taken over by Peter Jackson and Dreamworks.

But is the climate right now really that different? It depends who you ask. Duane Hopkins, the 35-year-old director of Better Things, is sure it is. "Film-making culture in Britain is really going through a shift at the moment; and it's up to us as film-makers – and financiers and the audience, of course – to decide which way we want that culture to go," he says. His film is typical of the new breed: a spare, lyrical study of rural disenchantment, detailing the beauty of the English countryside as well as the human desperation it can contain.

But Robert Beeson, managing director of art-film specialist distributors New Wave, is resigned to the commercial difficulties such films face. "It's tough. We didn't do [Better Things], but I know it didn't perform as the cinemas wanted and it got ripped out immediately. The exhibition scene is very Darwinian."

What Beeson is alluding to is the separation of two key functions in the film industry: distributors – the sales agents who own the local rights to individual films – and exhibitors, who own the cinemas and book the films in. The distributors of small art films have to be risk-takers and gamblers, and must care deeply about their product. But the cinemas – even the more apparently cerebral ones – are all about bums on seats. In fact, according to Beeson, "it's basically one person on the exhibition circuit who decides all this".

It's an open secret who that one person is. Clare Binns, the programming director of the arthouse chain City Screen Picturehouses (which owns 18 UK venues and programmes films for more than 30 others), has the job of deciding, every Monday morning, what stays and what goes. Binns is matter-of-fact about prospects for British art cinema: "There's certainly commitment out there for people to release these films, but were you to ask me if they were huge successes, I think it's a struggle. The fact of the matter is, a film like Sleep Furiously, which got good reviews, did not do well at the box office. So you have to make decisions every week, and it's got to be about people choosing to spend their money to go and see them."

Does she feel any responsibility to nurture talented but less popular film-makers? "On a Monday, when these decisions are made, it's about who takes most money. We have always tried to support as many films as possible, but this is a tough old world. We could fill our cinemas with all the films we like, but then we wouldn't have the cinemas to put them in."

For Binns, Sleep Furiously – a poetic non-fiction essay on a Welsh village in decline – was not a success. But history tells us, of course, that popularity is not all; commercial disasters such as Night of the Hunter have stuck around while many massive films have vanished from our consciousness. Mike Figgis, who has an executive producer credit on Sleep Furiously, is delighted with its impact. "Sure, it's very esoteric subject matter," he says. "But [director] Gideon Koppel is an example of someone who has a very clear vision, and the result crosses boundaries and reaches a far wider audience than anyone anticipated."

Figgis is another who detects a fair wind for a British new wave. "Gideon's film could have come out another time and had a good response, but it might not have captured people's imaginations in quite the same way. The right energy at the right time continues to be vital. At the moment, the energy is economically coloured, and politically coloured. We are looking inward and we ask questions about our culture."

But Binns has a point about the dire box-office returns. Sleep Furiously, which Beeson released through New Wave, has taken £74,000 so far. (It reportedly cost £230,000, itself a relatively tiny sum.) Helen, another recent British art film distributed by New Wave, did much worse, mustering around £22,000 – "It got very good reviews but nobody went." The third and best performing of Beeson's own mini-wave was Joanna Hogg's Unrelated, which took £102,000, and won the inaugural Guardian first film award.

Unrelated is arguably the most remarkable of all the current crop. Made by a director who had spent a decade working in TV, and taking on the terminally unfashionable subject of a middle-class woman's emotional meltdown, it had none of the official funding or support non-mainstream cinema is normally dependent on.

"I knew I was making something that I didn't want to compromise on," says Hogg, "which was why I didn't knock on any of those doors. But the most difficult part came after finishing it. I thought – naively – that there would always be a way of getting it shown. But it took a long while before it was selected for the London film festival, and only after that did it get distribution."

Duane Hopkins is on another route: his latest project, a multi-screen work called Sunday, was presented as an art installation in Gateshead's Baltic. He is the perfect example of the new breed of director, equally at home in the gallery and the cinema. Hopkins says, with messianic fervour: "You have a generation who don't care about distinctions – all they want is to find an aesthetic they like."

Figgis, too, is prophetic about the prospects of cross-fertilisation brought about by internet-based digital culture. "The old order is going: cinemas and art galleries are no longer focal points of our culture. There's loads and loads of new stuff out there. Whether it's existing in the traditional idea of the film industry, I don't know. But the genie's out of the bottle."

Whether cinema really is dying is a debate for another day. But there's no doubting the effect that artists – people such as Douglas Gordon, Julian Schnabel and Steve McQueen – have had on cinema in general, and British art movies in particular. In hindsight, there's grounds for concluding that Gordon's much-admired Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (made in collaboration with French avant-gardist Philippe Parreno) marked the point when this whole boomlet began, in 2006.

But it's Hunger, last year's feature film debut of Steve McQueen, that has been the flagship of the current movement, as well as being the most high-profile product of the artist-turned-film-director tendency. Laden with awards and relatively successful at the box office – taking £750,000, against a £2m budget and a £250,000 Film Council grant to assist distribution – Hunger has shown that British art cinema can have a major international impact.

Robin Gutch is clear about why the film stood out: "Film-makers who come from visual arts, by definition, come from a different way of working. In Britain the tradition has been to see cinema as part of the performing or literary arts, but there's always been a strand, going back to Peter Greenaway, of people who see cinema as being part of the visual arts. The danger of art cinema is that it can become hermetic and self-regarding, but Hunger had a political and personal resonance. That's why it had the impact it did."

And what of the future? Beeson says he is not confident he will find anything to follow up his triple of Unrelated, Helen and Sleep Furiously. "There doesn't seem to be anything similar on the British art film side that stands out," he says. "So it may have been a pure accident." Over at Picturehouses, Clare Binns says she'll be supporting Duncan Jones's Moon, though it's open to question how much of a risk that is; the film is backed by Sony. The question remains: can these film-makers, like Arnold, can turn their initial, confident stride into a continuing career?

• This article was amended on 24 July 2009 to take into account the most recent figures for box-office takings by three of the films mentioned. When the original article was published, receipts for Helen stood at £15,000, for Unrelated £96,000, and for Sleep Furiously £59,000. This has been updated.